Launched Float Lab, First In-River Filtration Test

Raising $273K from 3,175 people on Kickstarter was insane (all those brave people can be found here), but even more insane was building a filtration system and floating it out into the river.

Thanks to the extraordinary help of our naval architects Persak & Wurmfeld, our engineers at Arup, our fabricators at Olollo, an amazing team of students at CUNY, Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, our friends at Riverkeeper, River Project, and the Community Boathouse, our material specialists at Macworth Environmental, the generosity of Dynamic Rubber, the amazing Hudson River Park Trust and countless others, Float Lab was painstakingly built over the course of several months—both in Brooklyn and at Liberty Landing Marina in New Jersey—and floated into position at Pier 40.

Our goal with Float Lab was to filter out the bacteria in the river to the level needed to make + POOL possible. We compared background river water quality to both primary and secondary filtration stages and measured the percentage of reduction at each point in the system.

We tested 9 different combinations of filtration materials (yes, 9), and the first 8 produced no results.  We were getting calls from our Kickstarter backers asking about our progress and were prepared to say we couldn’t make it work.